Teach42

Notes from the morning sessions from the WOMMA conference

The old way to market: Develop a compelling message, attain high reach and frequency, and maintain a consistent message over time. That’s been the traditional way to do marketing and we’ve all seen it again and again and again. I remember someone telling me once that people are bombarded by 30,000 ads per day. I just looked up for three seconds and saw logos for WOMMA, Windows XP, Intel, Macintosh, Toshiba, Energy Star, Poland Springs, Walt Disney World, and more. We’re flooded by these marketing principles.

The WOM principles are different, but the slide went by too quick for me to type them up. The gist of it is that a happy customer is your best advertisement. Listen to your customers and then use that to drive your marketing. Actually, the slides are in a packet they handed out, the principles of WOM are: A happy customer is the greatest endorsement, give customers a voice, listen to consumers and engage the community. Listen first, then talk.

Right now the presenter is comparing traffic of sites like eBay to Walmart.com. He also compares Jacquiellawson.com (sp.) to Hallmark.com and pointing out that these former sites get so much more traffic than the latter sites. However, I’m not sure that it’s really a fair comparison. Hallmark.com is basically an add on to the Hallmark stores. They’re about brick and mortar, not online. The online supports the brick and mortar. Is the goal to drive traffic to the web or to get people to drive to their stores? I’d imagine the latter. So what does that comparison really tell us? Not much.

By the way, I know I harp on this all the time, but this is yet another conference where there is no free WiFi. I’ve now counted thirteen people take out their laptops, go into the wireless networking control panel and check for a connection. All but two (one of which is myself) have then closed their laptop and put it away. What does that tell you? Tells me that a lot of people would like to stay connected while they attend the conference. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times, I learn better when I am connected to the internet. I prefer to look up key points while people talk about them, so I can build associations and identify points for further research. I can’t do that now.

While I’m on the subject of suggestions for future conferences, they did something very cool, which is putting all the presentations (Powerpoint slides that is) together in a packet and then handing them out to everyone. Very nice. They saved paper too by laying out 9 slides per page. However, that also means that the type on many of the slides is too small to read! Also, if anybody does Powerpoint like I do, then the slides are essentially worthless. I want people paying attention to me, not reading my slides. So I try to minimize the amount of text that I have on the page and focus on images that simply accentuate what I’m saying. Electronic copies saved as PDF’s really should be made available as well. If they are available, I’ll be thrilled. I’d check but there’s no WiFi (have I mentioned that yet?). They did announce that the slides will be up on the website as well. That’s a good thing.

Here’s a couple highlights about what WOM actually is. “Word of Mouth” is an outcome and a philosophy, not a marketing tactic. “Noticeable” or irreverent marketing is not Word of Mouth; there’s no “marketer” in “consumer-to-consumer”. Word of Mouth can be treated like traditional media in many ways; but uncontrolled, unprompted “media” sometimes behaves wildly. There’s a few things for you to chew on.

One thing that has come through loud and clear is that the people in this room want to change the world of marketing. Ethics are at the forefront of the conversation. It’s about letting your product speak for itself and using heavy handed tactics to beat your potential customers into submitting to a purchase. It’s also about having more respect for your customer than to believe that slick advertising is going to make them believe your product is any more than it actually is. For example, have you heard that commercial where some teenager had no social life until they got a McDonald’s Arch Card (basically a gift card)? Once he got the card, his social life immediately picked up! That sort of ad insults the intelligence of the audience. I understand what they’re trying to ‘say’, the card is fun, exciting, social, and so on, but when you get right down to it the product is a card that let’s you buy a 70 cent piece of meat on a bun. Sound fun and social, doesn’t it? They can’t let their product speak for itself, so they have to deceive the customer instead.

Several hours later
The battery on my laptop was starting to run down and I knew I was going to need to be using it later, so unfortunately I shut the lid on it. The main rooms, where most of the sessions were taking place, had a total of four outlets. All of them were being used after the first couple of hours. I have a little notebook where I took a ton of notes that I may turn into blog entries, but the lack of power combined with the lack of WiFi hamstrung my ability to blog, and more importantly, my ability to explore connections between what people were talking about and my own experiences in real time. Very disappointing to me.

I’m in a session right now about using customer experiences to get people talking. There are eight sets of outlets in the room and I got one of them. Since I’m in the back of the room, I actually am within range of the WiFi you can purchase access to as well. Insid,e I’m doing the happy snoopy dance. It’s the year 2006. Power and network access is critical in my opinion.

This has been a public service message for anybody involved with conference management.

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